Fixed Assets Management in SAP Business One 9.0

Fixed Assets Management in SAP Business One 9.0, this article will showcase a deep insight on the topic.

Fixed Assets management is a common requirement across almost all industries round the world. For example for a service provider -office furniture and equipment, for a manufacturer – factory machines and tools, etc. all are under category of fixed assets. Hence managing the valuable items, which are not a part of the core trading, is also equally important like inventory items’ management.

Managing fixed assets inventory somewhat could be possible in SAP Business One without any add-on. But some unavoidable functions like depreciation of fixed assets could not be automated without the Fixed Assets add-on. Till SAP B1 8.8 family, availability of the add-on was not global, so the lacking of complete features for fixed assets management was a considerable gap in SAP Business One in many countries.

Now with the advent of SAP Business One 9.0, the Fixed Assets add-on is becoming integrated with the core product and consequently all the features for end to end fixed assets management are available across the world. Let’s have a look on how to work with Fixed Assets Management in SAP Business One 9.0

To start working with SAP B1’s Fixed Assets, we need to enable it from Administration module as shown in the figure below.

Once the fixed assets feature is activated then the financial module setup will have all the menus for fixed assets setup shown in the following figure. Some important parts of this area like a separate account determination should be focused at the time of implementation. In “Account Determination – Setup” we can determine the GL accounts for various types of fixed assets as per requirement.

Next important part of this area is defining various depreciation types as per requirement as shown in the following figure.

Using “Depreciation Area” we can have multiple depreciation types assigned to each type of asset, which can be helpful to evaluate the depreciation results in various methods for the same asset. So to achieve this and to complete the fixed assets setup – two small settings named “Depreciation Areas” (to create various depreciation areas as per requirement) and “Asset Classes” (to determine the links between depreciation areas, account determinations, and depreciation types) need to be done.

Once initial setup for fixed assets is over, then fixed asset master data need to be created from the financial module. In fact from financial module most of the fixed assets transactions are carried out except purchase and sales. Following figure shows the master data window for fixed assets which is identical to the well-known inventory item master data window. The only “Fixed Assets” tab can be identified as a new area for fixed asset related options among which “Asset Class” is a mandatory option to be filled to complete a fixed asset master data record.

Once fixed assets master data are added then all the fixed assets related transactions using those master data can be carried out in SAP B1. Two obvious transactions, named Purchasing of fixed assets (can be done through the A/P invoice of purchasing module) and Sales of fixed assets (can be done through the A/R invoice of sales module), are same as general purchase and sales in SAP B1 correspondingly. But the transactions like Capitalization and Retirement of fixed assets are specifically related to fixed assets. All fixed assets specific transactions are available in aforesaid “Fixed Assets” module under the financials of SAP Business One 9.0.

It is better to note that capitalization of fixed assets is carried-out by purchasing of new assets or by taking old assets into account at any later stage in SAP B1. The second case (old assets’ capitalization) can be carried out by the “Capitalization” transaction / document in SAP B1. And the capitalizations of new assets which are done by purchasing are also reflected in the same document type automatically. On the other hand retirement is just the opposite scenario of capitalization which is carried out by sales and “Retirement” transaction / document types.

There are other self-explanatory features like “Depreciation Run”, “Asset Revaluation”, etc. in the fixed assets module those are required for standard fixed assets management. Apart from the settings, master data, and transactions, fixed assets module provides various useful reports for fixed assets related analytics.